The best illustration of how research focused on understanding and simulating the behavior of ants and other social insects can serve as an inspiration for the creation of computational algorithms for the resolution of challenging mathematical problems is Ant Colony Optimization (ACO).
The ACO discipline has seen enormous progress since it was first introduced by Marco Dorigo in his Ph.D. thesis (1992) and initially applied to the traveling salesman issue. It now stands as a significant nature-inspired stochastic metaheuristic for challenging optimization problems.
This book presents cutting-edge ACO techniques and is broken up into two sections: (I) Techniques, which includes parallel implementations, and (II) Applications, where recent ACO contributions to a variety of fields, including traffic congestion and control, structural optimization, manufacturing, and genomics are presented.
